The portal project is the latest element of the pair’s 15-year-long effort to raise awareness of the rich world of African poetry. In 2010, while teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Kwame Dawes founded the African Poetry Book Fund, which has published and promoted more than 200 collections of new works by living African poets. Now, with the African Poetry Digital Portal, poets will also have a chance to gain visibility and academic attention.

“It’s not that scholarship isn’t being done on African poetry, but the scholarship isn’t nearly as accessible as scholarship on, say, Walt Whitman,” Kwame Dawes said. “There needs to be an understanding that African poetry warrants that kind of attention.”

Recovering records

There are many reasons why African poetry is hard to find and study outside of Africa, said Lorna Dawes, a research and engagement librarian at Brown’s Center for Library Exploration and Research.

For one thing, most universities’ archives haven’t yet fully catalogued their existing African poetry collections. In addition, some of those yet-to-be-catalogued poems are fragile, having been delivered orally and recorded on vinyl records or cassette tapes, which degrade with age. 

Yet another reason for the limited access: In the wake of chattel slavery and European colonization of Africa, Africans and their descendants were left scattered across the globe. Borders and oceans often separated poetry records, leaving scholars without full context, Lorna Dawes said.

“Let’s say you have a poet whose original poem was part of an oral chant tradition,” she said. “The original recording might be housed at a university in Togo, but a written version is inside a manuscript at a museum in France, and an English translation is in a book at a university in the United States. If you’re at a U.S. university doing this research, you might not know those other records are out there, or that the poem was originally an oral chant.”

In the first year of the grant project, Lorna Dawes will provide library staff in universities across the globe funds to unearth, organize and describe their African poetry collections. The catalog metadata will eventually be added to the portal, helping to raise awareness of the diversity of African poetry and giving scholars a more complete understanding of the poetry they study.

“We’re bringing those dispersed pieces together digitally so scholars can go and find everything, giving them a more holistic picture of a poet or a work,” Lorna Dawes said. “It’s a digital reunification.”

Poetry in context

The portal won’t just act as a repository for poems themselves. Built in collaboration with the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship, it will also provide important context for the poetry, Lorna Dawes said. 

With funds from the Mellon grant, the researchers will hire three postdoctoral research associates to work on three separate portal projects. An additional research editor will oversee and contribute to all three projects.

One postdoctoral researcher will build a comprehensive biographical database of hundreds of African poets. Scholars will be able to use the database to search for poets based on ethnicity, nationality, date of birth and other basic biographical information. Another researcher will lead the creation of critical bibliographies for key African poets such as Dennis Brutus, Christopher Okigbo and Safia Elhillo. Each bibliography will provide an overview of the poet’s life, works and impact, with notes on their narrative or editorial style and the accolades and criticism they faced. A third researcher will help build a repository of African poetry in the news. 

“My idea for this [third project] began with my interest in how these poets have been depicted in news media and how that has influenced Western perceptions of African poetry,” Lorna Dawes said. “It’s fascinating to compare how these poets are depicted in African newspapers with how they’re depicted in European newspapers.”

In an effort to further enrich research on African poetry, another portion of the grant will support the creation of eight digital humanities projects by global scholars. The scholars will be encouraged to use African Poetry Digital Portal resources for their research, which may later be added to the portal for future scholars to reference.

Why house all of these poems, biographies and research under one digital roof? For Kwame Dawes, the answer is simple: African poetry exists. Scholarship about it exists. And the world deserves free, easy access to both.

“In ‘Heart of Darkness,’ Joseph Conrad describes Africa as a place of nothingness,” he said. “It’s darkness; nobody has a voice. But poetry has existed in Africa as long as it’s existed anywhere else, and to say otherwise is erasure. To archive it, to organize it, to pay attention to it is to enact something profoundly humane. It’s a resistance to erasure.”